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Grammatical tense

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Grammatical tense is a way languages express the time at which an event described by a sentence occurs. In English, this is a property of a verb form, and expresses only time-related information.

Tense, along with a mood, voice and person, are four ways in which verb forms are frequently characterized, in languages where those categories apply. There are languages (mostly isolating languages, like Chinese) where tense is not expressed anywhere in the verb or any auxiliaries, but only as adverbs of time, when needed for comprehension; in the same condition, grammatical tense in certain languages can be expressed optionally (such as Vietnamese), for example, "sinh" meaning "birth" and "sanh" meaning "birthed"; and there are also languages (such as Russian) where verbs indicate aspect in addition to or instead of tense.

The exact number of tenses in a language is often a matter of some debate, since many languages include the state of certainty of the information, the frequency of the event, whether it is ongoing or finished, and even whether the information was directly experienced or gleaned from hearsay, as moods or tenses of a verb. Some of many grammarians consider these to be separate tenses, and some do not.

Tenses cannot be easily mapped but can be easily translated from one language into another. While all languages have a "default" tense with a name usually translated as "present tense" (or "simple present"), the actual meaning of this tense may vary considerably.

English tenses

Viewed in the strictest linguistic sense, English has only two tenses, marked in the verb alone: nonpast tense (present tense) and past tense. They are shown with the verb endings -Ø and -ed.

The following chart shows how T/M/A (tense/modal/aspect) is expressed in English:

Tense Modal Aspect Verb
Perfect Progressive
-Ø (nonpast)
-ed (past) 		Ø (none)
will (future) 		Ø (none)
have -en (perfect) 		Ø (none)
be -ing (progressive) 		do

Since will is a modal auxiliary, it cannot co-occur with other modals like can, may, and must. Only aspects can be used in infinitives. Some linguists consider will a future marker and give English two more tenses, future tense and future-in-past tense, which are shown by will and would respectively. Also, in nonlinguistic language study, aspects and mode are viewed as tenses.

Compound tenses

The more complex tenses in Indo-European languages are formed by combining a particular tense of the verb with certain verbal auxiliaries, the most common of which are various forms of "be", various forms of "have", and modal auxiliaries such as English will. Romance and Germanic languages often add "to hold", "to stand", "to go", or "to come" as auxiliary verbs. For example, Spanish uses estar ("to be") with the present gerund to indicate the present continuous. Portuguese uses ter ("to have") with the past participle for the perfect aspect. Swedish uses kommer att ("come to") for the simple future. These constructions are often known as complex tenses or compound tenses (a more accurate technical term is periphrastic tenses).

Examples of some generally recognized Indo-European and Finnish tenses using the verb "to go" are shown in the table below.

tense Germanic: English:
to go 		Romance: Spanish:
ir 		Romance: Italian:
andare 		Celtic : Irish:
téigh 		Germanic: Swedish:
att gå 		Finno-ugric: Finnish:
mennä 		Slavic: Bulgarian:
отивам/отида[1] 		notes
Present simple I go. (Yo) voy. (Io) vado. Téim. Jag går. (Minä) menen. Аз отивам. In most languages this is used for most present indicative uses. In English, it's used mainly to express habit or ability ("I play the guitar").
Present continuous I am going. (Yo) estoy yendo. (Io) sto andando. Tá mé ag dul. Jag är gående[2], jag går. (Minä) olen menossa. Аз отивам This form is prevalent in English to express current action, but is absent or rarer in other Indo-European languages, which prefer the simple present tense. Continuous is more an aspect than a tense and is included here only because of its prevalence in English to substitute for the Simple Present.
Present perfect I have gone. (Yo) he ido. (Io) sono andato. Jag har gått. (Minä) olen mennyt. Аз съм отишъл. Common past compound tense. In some languages indicates recent past, in others indicates an unknown past time. No equivalent in Irish.
Preterite I went. (Yo) fui. (Io) andai. Chuaigh mé. Jag gick. (Minä) menin. Аз отидох. In English (unlike in some languages with aorist tenses), this implies that the action took place in the past and that it is not taking place now.
Imperfect I used to go. (Yo) iba. (Io) andavo. Théinn.
Past continuous I was going. (Yo) estaba yendo. (Io) stavo andando. Bhí mé ag dul. Jag var gående[2], jag gick. (Minä) olin menossa. Аз отивах.
Pluperfect (past perfect) I had gone. (Yo) había ido. (Io) ero andato. Jag hade gått. (Minä) olin mennyt. Аз бях отишъл. This expresses that an action was completed before some other event.
Future I will go. (Yo) iré. (Io) andró. Rachaidh mé. Jag ska gå. (Minä) menen. Аз ще отида. This can be used to express intention, prediction, and other senses. In Finnish and Japanese there is no future tense; when speaking of the future, the present tense is used; a telic object may implicitly communicate the time.
Future perfect I will have gone. (Yo) habré ido. (Io) saró andato. Jag kommer att ha gått. (Minä) olen mennyt. Аз ще съм отишъл. This expresses a past action in a hypothetical future. As Finnish has no future tense, present perfect is used.
  1. ^ отивам and отида are two different verbs, both meaning "to go", and both can be conjugated in all the above tenses, but in order best to preserve the English and Bulgarian meaning, only some of their forms are shown.
  2. ^ a b This only works with adverbs, such as "I was going when someone suddenly stopped me"; not just "I was going to their house"

Tense, aspect, and mood

The distinction between grammatical tense, aspect, and mood is fuzzy and at times controversial. The English continuous temporal constructions express an aspect as well as a tense, and some therefore consider that aspect to be separate from tense in English. In Spanish the traditional verb tenses are also combinations of aspectual and temporal information.

Going even further, there's an ongoing dispute among modern English grammarians (see English grammar) regarding whether tense can only refer to inflected forms. In Germanic languages there are very few tenses (often only two) formed strictly by inflection, and one school contends that all complex or periphrastic time-formations are aspects rather than tenses.

The abbreviation TAM, T/A/M or TMA is sometimes found when dealing with verbal morphemes that combine tense, aspect and mood information.

In some languages, tense and other TAM information may be marked on a noun, rather than a verb. This is called nominal TAM.

Classification of tenses

Tenses can be broadly classified as:

  • absolute: indicates time in relationship to the time of the utterance (i.e. "now"). For example, "I am sitting down", the tense is indicated in relation to the present moment.
  • relative: in relationship to some other time, other than the time of utterance, e.g. "While strolling through the shops, she saw a nice dress in the window". Here, the "saw" is relative to the time of the "strolling". The relationship between the time of "strolling" and the time of utterance is not clearly specified.
  • absolute-relative: indicates time in relationship to some other event, whose time in turn is relative to the time of utterance. (Thus, in absolute-relative tense, the time of the verb is indirectly related to the time of the utterance; in absolute tense, it is directly related; in relative tense, its relationship to the time of utterance is left unspecified.) For example, "When I walked through the park, I saw a bird." Here, "saw" is present relative to the "walked", and "walked" is past relative to the time of the utterance, thus "saw" is in absolute-relative tense.

Moving on from this, tenses can be quite finely distinguished from one another, although no language will express simply all of these distinctions. As we will see, some of these tenses in fact involve elements of modality (e.g. predictive and not-yet tenses), but they are difficult to classify clearly as either tenses or moods.

Many languages define tense not just in terms of past/future/present, but also in terms of how far into the past or future they are. Thus they introduce concepts of closeness or remoteness, or tenses that are relevant to the measurement of time into days (hodiernal or hesternal tenses).

Some languages also distinguish not just between past, present, and future, but also nonpast, nonpresent, nonfuture. Each of these latter tenses incorporates two of the former, without specifying which.

Some tenses:

Bibliography

  • Bybee, Joan L., Revere Perkins, and William Pagliuca (1994) The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World. University of Chicago Press.
  • Comrie, Bernard (1985) Tense. Cambridge University Press. [ISBN 0-521-28138-5]
  • Downing, Angela, and Philip Locke (1992) "Viewpoints on Events: Tense, Aspect and Modality". In A. Downing and P. Locke, A University Course in English Grammar, Prentice Hall International, 350--402.
  • Guillaume, Gustave (1929) Temps et verbe. Paris: Champion.
  • Hopper, Paul J., ed. (1982) Tense-Aspect: Between Semantics and Pragmatics. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  • Smith, Carlota (1997). The Parameter of Aspect. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
  • Tedeschi, Philip, and Anne Zaenen, eds. (1981) Tense and Aspect. (Syntax and Semantics 14). New York: Academic Press.

See also

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